Multibiometric system using fuzzy level set, and genetic and evolutionary feature extraction

This study presents a multimodal system that optimises and integrates the iris and face features based on fusion at the score level. The proposed multibiometric system has two novelties as compared with the previous work. First, the authors deploy a fuzzy C-means clustering with level set (FCMLS) method in an effort to localise the non-ideal iris images accurately. The FCMLS method incorporates the spatial information into the level set (LS)-based curve evolution approach and regularises the LS propagation locally. The proposed iris localisation scheme based on FCMLS avoids over-segmentation and performs well against blurred iris/sclera boundary. Second, genetic and evolutionary feature extraction (GEFE) is applied towards multimodal biometric recognition. GEFE uses genetic and evolutionary computation to evolve local binary pattern feature extractors to elicit distinctive features from the iris and facial images. Different weights for each modality are investigated to determine the significance of each modality. By using the FCMLS method to segment an iris image accurately, as well as using GEFE on a multibiometric dataset, the authors note improved performance of identification and verification accuracies over subjects on a unimodal dataset. More specifically, on the multimodal dataset of face and iris images, GEFE had an identification accuracy of 100%.